


Biding Time

by CurlicueCal



Series: Packstuck AU [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Bonding, Demons, Gen, POV Outsider, Psychic Wolves, Trolls with Dancestor Wolves, Xenoculture, wolf demon!Damara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-11 13:25:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3328271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurlicueCal/pseuds/CurlicueCal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Damara is a very unsettling wolf and Aradia is not unsettled.<br/>As experienced by two unfortunate troll caretakers and their wolf-sibs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Biding Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a standalone backstory for my [packstuck 'verse.](http://archiveofourown.org/series/149736)  
> with thanks to asuka for troubleshooting when i got stuck in an edit-loop. <3

“Ha. Thought I’d find you hiding out here, Tallus.”

You lift your head very slightly from where you are sprawled out on a sunset-warmed rock by the entrance to the brooding cavern. A short, stocky troll stares back at you, his arms crossed and his close-cropped clumpy hair sticking out in as crazy angles as his two offset horns. He grins, showing equally spiky teeth. Harris has alway been immune to your staredowns. 

Settling your chin back on your arms, you return to your lounging. “We’re not hiding. We’re watching.”

“Uh huh. Sure.” He boosts himself up onto the rock and crouches near you to watch Rideau padding out to touch noses with your wolf-sister. 

“Somebody has to do it,” you say mildly. 

Harris just rolls his eyes. “Like you didn’t trade Tarlyn for his shift on the roster. And how are the little imps doing tonight?”

_\--They are leaving the den/pupating/fledging--_ Your wolf-sister’s thoughts are wound through a mental picture of clumsy baby birds, fluttering and flopping from the nest. You suppose that’s a charitable enough interpretation of the freshly pupated clutch of trolls, still stumbling about the cavern entrance trying to figure out how their new limbs work.

_\--Cute, cute, vulnerable, yum,--_ Troxxi adds, and lets one of the trolls pull itself up to its feet with fistfuls of her fur.

_\--You are weird,--_ you tell her, without heat.

_\--I am watching,--_ she corrects. _(--guarding--_ the thought echoes. And: _\--playing. You like it, too.--)_

You bask on your warm rock and don’t bother with a retort.

Harris cocks his head, a devil’s grin on his face as he follows the exchange. You can feel the light psychic touch on your packbond, his packsense opened enough to you to listen in, but still leaving all four of you a respectably large personal headspace. It’s careful, which makes it comfortable. You are reminded why you can tolerate him most days. For all he’s an incurable gossip that seems to know everyone in the thousand packs, Harris is as much a loner at heart as you.

And is it any wonder so many of you gravitate into the Empress’s own service? Guarding the home ground, tending the sleepers, caring for the brood. Lone wolves with the safety net of pack still. No alphas and pack hierarchy drama, just your duty to the dreaming queen, and the security of knowing that you will not wander lost when you die.

Below, another little troll grabs at Rideau’s fur. The dark grey wolf sidesteps the grasping hands and nudges the thing off in a different direction. You notice that under his supervision the scattered clutch of pupated trolls are starting to be distributed in perfect little clumps of three. Your breath hisses out in amusement. You have never met a wolf more obsessed with keeping things orderly.

“Missed one, Ri,” Harris says, swinging his feet idly from his rock perch. His wolf-brother trots off toward where the indicated offender is just grooming the last wisps of cocoon free from its hair.

“So how many packs are here now?” you ask.

“Twenty _seven_ ,” Harris says, with the self-satisfaction of a troll always in possession of the most accurate social information.

“Mother wolf.” You spend a moment being glad again for your quiet rock and your duty which makes such an excellent escape. Your skin itches just thinking about it. Crowds. Noise. Endless quadrant finagling and pack maneuvering. Hsst.

“Eight more today,” Harris adds. “And a bunch of their wolves claiming pups. You’re missing all the excitement.”

“Small gifts.”

He slants a pointy-toothed grin of agreement.

The sound of growls and raised voices cuts the air, as a squabble starts up among a triad of little trolls. Rideau huffs and paces over to stick his nose between the things. They don’t immediately break it up, and he bumps them all to their asses and stands over them, the white band of fur around his neck bristling, blasting them with a mental wave of sharp-scented disapproval. They go wide-eyed and silent.

“‘Sorry’,” Harris prompts, from the rock. 

“ _Rrr-ry,_ ” echoes back one of the more precocious youngsters. The others just duck their horns and look submissive.

Rideau’s tail taps once in approval before he paces away. You note a flurry of secretive shoving and low-voiced chattering behind him, but at least the shrieking has stopped. 

Troxxi observes everything with evident amusement at wolf and troll alike, ensconced in her favored position of passively indulgent observer. Case in point, one of the trollets is climbing her like a furry grey mountain, all unheeded by your ridiculous sister.

“Wuff!” the thing declares to a clutchmate, bouncing in place, and Troxxi just lolls her tongue out, shifting her stance to accommodate the scant weight.

_\--Weird,--_ you tell her again. 

_\--They are wiggly and interesting,--_ she returns.  _\--prey/not-prey/ours-to-keep.--_

You rattle out a derisive noise, but let just a hint of the thought echo back to her. _\--(Keep.)--_ You suppose the little things do make a diverting enough occupation for a week or two. Something more to look at than cocoons. Less mess and squeaking than wigglers. This lot will disperse soon enough and you’ll have things to do that don’t involve warm stone and quiet hours. 

The older juveniles, at least, mostly keep to their own company and their own devices, requiring much less tending than these wobbly, newly-verbal things. A few perigees and these will be running around the home ground with the other feral youngsters, playing at the packs they might make or join when they’re older. Honestly, you have trouble really thinking of anyone as _people_ until they have at least enough sweeps behind them to bond.

Puppies are cuter.

Rideau’s head comes up. The big wolf’s ears point, his tail flagging out behind him. _\--_ ’ _Ware, pack.--_

Harris rolls to his feet, cursing quietly. “Who let the Witch come wandering through all unannounced?”

“She can do what she likes, I suppose.” You shift just enough to coil your limbs beneath you, but otherwise remain in place, low to the rocks and still. Waiting. You don’t have to turn your head because Troxxi already has eyes on the advancing wolf. Your wolf-sister is also still. You can feel her presence in your mind, equally alert. Patient.

“Well it’s not what _I_ like,” Harris grumbles. You suspect the larger part of his complaint is irritation that his social information network is not in order. But then, no one ever really knows what Damara gets up to.

The widow-wolf that pads across the open rock face on quiet paws is not of a particularly intimidating build. Angular and raw-boned in her full grown size, Damara’s black fur is striped with old scars, her silhouette unbalanced by a missing ear. It shouldn’t be enough to set her apart from any other world-battered wolf, but—It’s something skittering in the rust red glimmer at the edge of her eyes or perhaps the unnatural smoothness of her gait that makes the velvet on your neck and arms stand on end. Or maybe it’s just growing up on stories of the only wolf to survive not just her troll-sister’s death, but the massacre of her entire pack.

A widowed wolf or troll, can, with the support of pack and quadrantmates, live on. They might, in time, even re-bond, if they can find a soul that resonates in close enough sympathy to their own. But a wolf alone? You shiver.

You don’t lend any credence to the darker whispers, the ones that hint at what Damara might have had to do with her packmates’ deaths or how she might have survived them all. But you are cautious. To be the sole survivor of so many dead is burden enough. More than just dead, with no alpha to hold them, no queen to weave their lives back into the pack. Dead and gone. Dead and _lost_.

You are cautious, and you are respectful, because surely no wolf could survive all of that sane.

“She’s coming our way,” Harris sing-songs, like a shared joke. He jumps down to take up his brother’s flank—neither of them aggressive yet, but both their postures open to confrontation. Troxxi remains in place, in easy striking distance of the whole area beyond the cavern’s entrance. She pays no mind to the toddling trolls that still giggle and snarl and run about. You hold your sniper’s vantage point. Mentally, you’re all opening to each other, reaching for the psychic bonds between you, drawing closer, because you may be inclined to the solitary, but you’ll never stand alone.

Rideau hums across your minds in silent query.  _\--Call for pack/family/ours?--_

_\--Wait-and-see,--_ is your wolf-sister’s input, and you murmur soft agreement: _\--Guard your ground.--_

The scarred wolf pays no apparent mind to any of you, sauntering on in an arrow-line toward her destination with the serene confidence of the entitled or the unpredictably vicious. You wait until she’s nearly level with you, until it’s clear she means to trot right in among the clutch of new-molts. 

You open your packsense wide and send out a single, sharp, psychic pulse, Troxxi’s mental voice buzzing through yours in counterpoint. It’s a wordless warning, as much notice as threat. Here I am; push no farther.

Every tiny troll in the cavern mouth falls silent.

Damara cocks her head, her single ear perked, one gold-in-red eye angled up toward your perch on the stone. The dark wolf lolls her tongue from her mouth and trots on.

At your belt, your fingers fit needles to darts, fanning out an array in order of deadliness. Rideau growls, a low, rising rumble, and Harris’s morning star has found his hands. Troxxi crouches, ready.

The black wolf looks at you all, and past you all, like you look at the toddling trolls. Damara brushes between Rideau and his troll-brother without the slightest indication she notices their challenge. Rideau spins, offended, and snaps at her shoulder.

The world—changes.

For just that single moment that teeth brush fur, the clearing is cold, the lights and shadows twist strange and sharp, and shapes move at the corner of your vision—slinking on four legs and darting on two. A noise fills the air like wind crying through empty spaces, echoing with the sound of distant voices.

You can’t feel your pack.

_You can’t feel your sister._

The world snaps back into place, and it’s like coming up out of an icy lake, gasping for breath. Troxxi curls into your mind, fierce and frantic and beautiful, thoughts wrapping tight around you in wordless crush of possessiveness. You reach back along your bond to tangle her to you just as tight.

On your rock, you sit very still. Be silent. Be patient. Observe the situation before deciding how to act.

Harris and Rideau look staggered, but somehow still hold their ground. Stubborn. Their sides heave and they haven’t moved, except for Harris’s hand, gripping a handful of dark grey fur at Rideau’s flank.

Around the clearing, the little trolls cower, too unsteady on their legs to bolt for cover. They crouch against the rocks, wary and still. Damara paces through the center of the silence, her tail high, her tongue still lolling in wolfish amusement. You wonder if it is a trick of the light that shapes still seem to move in the shadows around her.

The silence stretches like a tripwire.

A shriek of noise snaps the moment, and it takes you one heart-pounding second to identify the sound as laughter. One of the little trolls is laughing.

Damara turns toward the source.

Leaning back on its hands, dark curls still shaking with giggles, the little troll looks up and beams like a demented hop-vermin at the scarred wolf prowling towards her. A tiny hand reaches out toward the black fur—

—you tense, thinking of chill air, of half-seen figures ghosting past you,of that sense of utter _separation_ — 

—and the hand plants flat on the big wolf’s muzzle. A second hand reaches up to join it. Damara huffs into the troll’s chest as it levers itself up. It’s a tiny thing; rustblood, ram-curl horns, and a mane of dark hair still cobwebbed with cocoon silk. It hangs off jaws that could crush it without thought, at the heart of shadows that still seem to move just beyond sight, and the little thing giggles again. Damara turns her head to look into the troll’s eyes.

“Empress fuck a bucket,” Harris mutters, and it’s a strange shock to hear his voice again.

And then Damara scruffs the little troll, scoops her up like a puppy, and turns to trot back the way she came.

You’re almost too caught in the moment to do anything but watch. Almost.

You have a duty.

You leap from your rock, flashing to stand in front of the scarred, black wolf. Troxxi is beside you in two bounds, sliding wide around your quarry with liquid speed. Through your packbonds you can feel Harris and Rideau collecting themselves, moving carefully to support you.

_\--Damara--_ your wolf-sister says. In her mental voice the name is the sound and scent of howling winds over fire-ravaged, barren earth.

_\--We are charged to protect.--_

Gold eyes consider you both, the rust red at their edges gleaming strangely. She draws her lips back, showing off the sharp teeth so nearly in the neck of the little troll. Her voice, when it pushes into your mind, is all jagged, trapped edges and mocking question.  _\--Would I harm my little sister?--_

You hesitate.

_\--(Pack-killer)--_ Damara’s mind-voice echoes, taunting, _\--(Ghost-maker)--_ and you’ve heard all these names for her whispered before.

But. 

_\--You’d be alone,--_ you say. _\--Again.--_ (Cold air and moving shadows and choking isolation.)

Damara makes a breathy, coughing sound. 

You blink. You’ve never seen a wolf laugh like a troll before.

_\--Clever pup,--_ she croons, and continues on her way.  _\--But I’m never alone.--_

And in her jaws hangs the little troll, grinning and reaching out for shapes unseen.

**Author's Note:**

> I hardly ever write OCs but I did this time so here is some trivia you didn't ask for:
> 
> Tallus and Troxxi are themed off of western diamondback rattlesnakes, and Harris and Rideau off tasmanian devils. Both of which are solitary species with surprisingly complex social networks, which also practice broodcare and/or attendance of young. (The name Harris is also related to hedgehogs. :p )
> 
> Their pack is sometimes referred to as the Unruly Jades, because a startling number of jadebloods seem to wind up in the homepack (possibly a lot of them are related). Tallus is olive-almost-jade and Harris is brown. #TMYK


End file.
